In this blog, I confront the reality that most SMEs operate without true visibility into their own performance. While departments rely on countless tools and platforms to track fragmented data, none of it rolls up into a unified system that connects costs directly to value. CEOs and leaders are left juggling spreadsheets, meetings, and incomplete reports, never fully knowing if their investments are paying off. I argue that every cost-consuming element in a business must continuously justify its value. Until a real-time, comprehensive Signal exists, companies will keep playing a game where the scoreboard remains dark.
Most businesses today are flying blind.
We have no shortage of software. Every department runs on its own stack. Sales has its CRM. Marketing has its analytics. Operations has its project trackers. Finance has its ledgers. HR has its payroll. Support has its tickets. Each platform tracks its own little corner of the work, and each delivers some version of performance reporting. In a sense, we do have parts of the Score — scattered across the organization in fragments.
But what we don’t have — especially as small and mid-sized businesses — is the Signal that ties it all together.
Because none of this rolls up cleanly into one unified view of value. The CEO can’t sit down, pull up a single live dashboard, and see exactly how every unit of cost — every person, vendor, subscription, tool, and machine — is performing relative to the value it’s meant to deliver. The pieces exist, but they sit in silos. Stitching them together requires massive investments in infrastructure, middleware, data warehousing, and integration teams that only the largest enterprises can afford to build. And even then, those systems become their own full-time machines to maintain — armies of people feeding, cleaning, and reconciling data to keep the illusion of visibility alive.
For most of us running SMEs, we know exactly what that would cost — not just in dollars, but in the constant labor required to install, monitor, and maintain it. So instead, we live with patchwork visibility. We export reports. We copy data into spreadsheets. We hold endless status meetings to fill in the gaps. We rely on department heads to summarize. We make judgment calls off incomplete data. And we tolerate the creeping sense that much of what we pay for may not actually be producing the value we intend.
Because underneath all the tools and reports, the real question remains unanswered: Is this work — this unit of cost, this role, this contract, this machine — actually producing value for the company? And if so, how much?
The problem isn’t that we lack data. It’s that we lack the true Signal — the continuous, unbroken thread that ties effort to cost, cost to output, and output to value, across the entire business. Think of it like watching a game where no one knows the score. The players are running. The crowd is cheering. The clock is ticking. But no one can say who’s winning — not because winning isn’t real, but because no one is actually recording when points are scored. The events happen, but no live scoring system exists to track it. That’s what it feels like running a business today.
And the deeper failure is that most companies never fully define what should even emit a Signal.
The truth is brutally simple: anything that consumes cost must report value. If something draws from company resources — human salary, vendor contracts, SaaS subscriptions, compute cycles, infrastructure — it must justify its existence continuously. It must publish its score. Otherwise, companies quietly accumulate financial drag. Expenses remain long after their value fades. Roles drift into irrelevance. Vendors stay on auto-renew. Work gets done — but its worth goes unmeasured.
Real operational control requires a live Signal — one that traces every unit of work back to its goal, monitors its actual cost and output, and calculates its real contribution to company value. Not loosely. Not quarterly. Continuously. Until that system exists, most SMEs will keep managing like spectators watching a game with no scoreboard. The players move. The money flows. The work happens. But no one really knows who is winning — or whether the business is compounding value or bleeding it away.
The scoreboard is dark. The score is missing. The Signal has not yet been built. But one day soon, it will be.
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